From the Very Beginning ....to the Troubled Times to come Before the Deluge...

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Tuesday, 7 August 2012

Nature Markets

Putting a price on the rivers and rain diminishes us all

George Monbiot

Payments for 'ecosystem services' look like the prelude to
the greatest privatisation since enclosure

'The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground,
bethought himself of saying 'This is mine', and found people simple enough to
believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars
and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have saved
mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his
fellows, 'Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once
forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to
nobody'."

Jean Jacques Rousseau would recognise this moment. Now it is
not just the land his impostors are enclosing, but the rest of the natural
world. In many countries, especially the United Kingdom, nature is being valued
and commodified so that it can be exchanged for cash.

The effort began in earnest under the last government. At a
cost of £100,000, it commissioned a research company to produce a total annual
price for England's ecosystems. After taking the money, the company reported –
with a certain understatement – that this exercise was "theoretically
challenging to complete, and considered by some not to be a theoretically sound
endeavour". Some of the services provided by England's ecosystems, it
pointed out, "may in fact be infinite in value".

This rare flash of common sense did nothing to discourage
the current government from seeking first to put a price on nature, then to
create a market in its disposal. The UK now has a natural capital committee, an
Ecosystem Markets Task Force and an inspiring new lexicon. We don't call it
nature any more: now the proper term is "natural capital". Natural
processes have become "ecosystem services", as they exist only to
serve us. Hills, forests and river catchments are now "green
infrastructure", while biodiversity and habitats are "asset classes"
within an "ecosystem market". All of them will be assigned a price,
all of them will become exchangeable.

The argument in favour of this approach is coherent and
plausible. Business currently treats the natural world as if it is worth
nothing. Pricing nature and incorporating that price into the cost of goods and
services creates an economic incentive for its protection. It certainly appeals
to both business and the self-hating state. The Ecosystem Markets Task Force
speaks of "substantial potential growth in nature-related markets – in the
order of billions of pounds globally".

Commodification, economic growth, financial abstractions,
corporate power: aren't these the processes driving the world's environmental
crisis? Now we are told that to save the biosphere we need more of them.

Payments for ecosystem services look to me like the prelude
to the greatest privatisation since Rousseau's encloser first made an exclusive
claim to the land. The government has already begun describing land owners as
the "providers" of ecosystem services, as if they had created the
rain and the hills and the rivers and the wildlife that inhabits them. They are
to be paid for these services, either by the government or by
"users". It sounds like the plan for the NHS.

Land ownership since the time of the first impostor has
involved the gradual accumulation of exclusive rights, which were seized from
commoners. Payments for ecosystem services extend this encroachment by
appointing the landlord as the owner and instigator of the wildlife, the water
flow, the carbon cycle, the natural processes that were previously deemed to
belong to everyone and no one.

But it doesn't end there. Once a resource has been
commodified, speculators and traders step in. The Ecosystem Markets Task Force
now talks of "harnessing City financial expertise to assess the ways that
these blended revenue streams and securitisations enhance the ROI [return on
investment] of an environmental bond". This gives you an idea of how far
this process has gone – and of the gobbledegook it has begun to generate.

Already the government is developing the market for trading
wildlife, by experimenting with what it calls biodiversity offsets. If a quarry
company wants to destroy a rare meadow, for example, it can buy absolution by
paying someone to create another somewhere else. The government warns that
these offsets should be used only to compensate for "genuinely unavoidable
damage" and "must not become a licence to destroy". But once the
principle is established and the market is functioning, for how long do you
reckon that line will hold? Nature, under this system, will become as fungible
as everything else.

Like other aspects of neoliberalism, the commodification of
nature forestalls democratic choice. No longer will we be able to argue that an
ecosystem or a landscape should be protected because it affords us wonder and
delight; we'll be told that its intrinsic value has already been calculated
and, doubtless, that it turns out to be worth less than the other uses to which
the land could be put. The market has spoken: end of debate.

All those messy, subjective matters, the motivating forces
of democracy, will be resolved in a column of figures. Governments won't need
to regulate; the market will make the decisions that politicians have ducked.
But trade is a fickle master, and unresponsive to anyone except those with the
money. The costing and sale of nature represents another transfer of power to
corporations and the very rich.

It diminishes us, it diminishes nature. By turning the
natural world into a subsidiary of the corporate economy, it reasserts the
biblical doctrine of dominion. It slices the biosphere into component
commodities: already the government's task force is talking of
"unbundling" ecosystem services, a term borrowed from previous
privatisations. This might make financial sense; it makes no ecological sense.
The more we learn about the natural world, the more we discover that its
functions cannot be safely disaggregated.

Rarely will the money to be made by protecting nature match
the money to be made by destroying it. Nature offers low rates of return by
comparison to other investments. If we allow the discussion to shift from
values to value – from love to greed – we cede the natural world to the forces
wrecking it. Pull up the stakes, fill in the ditch, we're being conned again.

about me

A new counter-culture is now spreading across the planet, a movement dedicated to protesting at the outlandish behaviour of the control freaks, with their surveillance, eavesdropping, secrecy and lies. Their greed and belligerent sabre rattling and their industries of war. The dream is to replace these sociopaths with Love!

I wish this blog to be a small part of this - We must be the change.

We will be set to task to rebuild our world and our planet from centuries of decimation and destruction brought on by the fallacy, the belief that we once tragically and collectively embraced thousands of years ago – the mistaken notion that we are separate from one another and everything else on the planet and in the universe. We will finally recognize that the truth is just the opposite – we are all one with everything on the planet and in the universe. We are spiritual beings, infinite consciousness simply having a human experience, and as soon we come to fully recognize and understand this, it will then finally be time for us to fly – to shine in all of our infinite, glorious possibility...